France May Be Ahead Of The Curve When It Comes To Global Warming Policy Backlash

Michael Bastach 2:26 PM 12/05/2018 | Energy

France might be ahead of the curve when it comes to climate policy backlash.

President Emmanuel Macron caved to demands from “yellow vests” over planned carbon taxes.

More backlash like this could be seen as countries try to phase out gas-powered cars.

The French love a good riot, but the political backlash to the French government’s plans to increase carbon taxes on fuel could be a harbinger of what’s to come in countries committed to the global warming crusade.

Constable told The Daily Caller News Foundation because of France’s heavy reliance on emissions-free nuclear power, the government has to look beyond power plants to achieve its global warming goals. Macron raised fuel taxes already in 2018 to cut down on oil demand, but it’s hard for working-class people to sacrifice their livelihoods for speculative climate benefits in the future.

“France is now heading into the zone where the marginal cost of emissions reduction begins to increase sharply,” Constable said. “They’ve done the easy bit, electricity, and are now beginning to coerce the more difficult sectors such as transport, which of course is already heavily taxed.”

Carbon taxes on diesel and gasoline were set to take effect in January. French President Emmanuel Macron agreed to delay implementing the taxes for six months in the face of protests, but that might not be enough to satisfy demonstrators.

“The extra burden imposed by Mr. Macron has caused something to snap, not demand but the temper of the people,” Constable said.

“Broadly speaking, I would judge that French popular anger is the shape of things to come globally, as climate policies begin to move into more difficult sectors,” Constable said.

A view shows a barricade with police forces and protesters wearing yellow vests, a symbol of a French drivers’ protest against higher diesel taxes, during clashes as part of a demonstration near the Place de l’Etoile in Paris, France, December 1, 2018. REUTERS/Stephane Mahe.

Australian lawmakers voted to repeal their country’s carbon tax in 2014. Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott led his conservative party to victory in the previous year’s elections on the promise to repeal the carbon tax.

However, France’s violent reaction to new carbon taxes is part of the country’s “romantic” view of political uprisings, according to an expert on French politics and history.

“In France the governments understand only violence, and since 1789, people have a romantic approach to ‘Revolution,’” George Chabert, a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, told TheDCNF. “Apparently, it is working this time as well.”

Carbon taxes were the breaking point for the thousands of gilet jaunes, or “yellow vests,” who took to the streets in late November. But the protests, considered the worst to hit Paris in 50 years, were also fueled by years of pent-up resentment against Macron’s policies.

“Since Macron came to power, he has cut taxes for the rich, ‘simplified’ the Work Laws, cut on pensions, and added billions of euros of new taxes to the working class and middle class,” Chabert said.

Firemen extinguish burning cars set afire by protesters wearing yellow vests, a symbol of a French drivers’ protest against higher diesel fuel taxes, during clashes near the Place de l’Etoile in Paris, France, December 1, 2018. REUTERS/Stephane Mahe.

“The new ‘ecological’ taxes, most of which was to be used in anything but ecology, are just one more,” Chabert said. “Many new taxes are programmed to come in effect until 2020.”

Many protesters also called on Macron to resign. Yellow vests say Macron is out of touch and centralizing power at the expense of working class citizens.

“Emmanuel Macron is a little boy who has always been told he’s the best, he’s always been idolised. He’s never been told ‘you shouldn’t do that’. The guy thinks he’s God!” Claudio, a 47-year-old Frenchman, told AFP.

“He deserves to have his head chopped off, symbolically,” said Claudio, who refused to give his full name to reporters.

Other protesters compared Macron to Napoleon and the pre-revolutionary Ancien Regime.

“He’s the king. It’s as if we’re in the Middle Ages!” echoed Philippe, a 74-year-old yellow vest leader.

Macron agreed to delay raising fuel taxes in January, but many protesters and political opponents don’t see the issue as settled. One self-proclaimed leader of the yellow vests said “we will not settle for crumbs.”

However, Macron is unlikely to abandon his green agenda. An ardent supporter of the Paris climate accord, Macron pledged to decarbonize French energy use by 2050 and was initially unyielding to protesters’ demands.

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While the climate warriors plan to spend other people’s money, it turns out that the other people noticed. I recall another revolution that had something about “no taxation without representation” involved in the mix. How did that turn out?

I keep looking through the Constitution and can’t find the amendment that gives the United Nations authority to tax Americans, and yet Rs and Ds in our Congress keep trying to do the UN’s bidding on this carbon tax stupidity.

In honour of “Les Giletes Jaunes”, below is posted an abbreviated French translation of our 2002 APEGA debate with the Pembina Institute, as published in La Presse on 28Nov2002.

Our Rebuttal was not published in French, but it contained perhaps the most important statements we made in 2002:

“THE ULTIMATE AGENDA OF PRO-KYOTO ADVOCATES IS TO ELIMINATE FOSSIL FUELS, BUT THIS WOULD RESULT IN A CATASTROPHIC SHORTFALL IN GLOBAL ENERGY SUPPLY – THE WASTEFUL, INEFFICIENT ENERGY SOLUTIONS PROPOSED BY KYOTO ADVOCATES SIMPLY CANNOT REPLACE FOSSIL FUELS.”
This statement is still clearly true today – fossil fuels continue to comprise about 85% of global primary energy, virtually unchanged in decades despite huge growth in global primary energy. If fossil fuels were eliminated tomorrow as the greens insist, everyone in the developed world would be dead in a month from starvation and exposure.

We also concluded in the same debate:
“CLIMATE SCIENCE DOES NOT SUPPORT THE THEORY OF CATASTROPHIC HUMAN-MADE GLOBAL WARMING – THE ALLEGED WARMING CRISIS DOES NOT EXIST.”
That statement is also true – all the observations point to a low climate sensitivity to increasing atmospheric CO2, no greater than ~1C/(2xCO2) [References: Christy and McNider 2017, Lewis and Curry 2018]. The IPCC’s climate computer models run much too hot, as they are designed to do to create false alarm.

In contrast, every scary prediction by the global warming alarmists in past decades has failed to materialize. Nobody should believe anything they say.

It really isn’t that Alan, the biggest problem is that the overwhelming majority of the British population (of all social and intellectual classes) simply has no idea there is even a debate to be had. Even worse, not one senior politician, nor one newspaper, nor one television channel nor major industrial figure (etc etc) will even dare to come out in public and express scepticism of the green narrative even if they think it, and AGW is now taught as gospel in schools, thereby brainwashing the younger generation. The British public at large therefore has no reason to think that there might be another point of view or another school of thought, or indeed any other alternative to windmills and similar for future energy supply, and we must all pay up regardless of cost.
I know this is mad, you know this is mad, everyone who reads WUWT knows it’s nuts but that is the reality for now. All we sceptics can do is keep spreading the word to all and sundry that there is an alternative train of thought. We’ll win in the end but god knows when that will be!

Our government is provoking Brexiters to try and understand what the reaction will be to cancelling Brexit altogether. They have tabled a number of options including cancelling the whole Brexit party, having another referendum (under the feeble premise that no one knew what they were voting for first time around), accepting a lousy deal etc.

The only options realistically available now are leaving with no deal which 17M+ Brexiters would be quite happy about or holding another referendum based on, of course, all the information we know now, which is no different to what we knew at the last referendum.

Move for another referendum and the tens of thousands of French demonstrators who took to the streets will be dwarfed by the 17M+ Brexit voters who will have been democratically betrayed by our government.

As the UK is the source of civilised parliament, the rule of law and democracy, this is a really big global deal. Screw this one up and our politicians are in for a very rude awakening.

If we do leave the EU with no deal, the will of the people will have been carried out as democracy demands. If not, the will of the people may well be conducted by violence and I sincerely hope the rest of the peaceful, democratic world would behind us in our desire to maintain the democratic will of the people.

I’ll add this. The last major confrontation between the UK government was the miners strike. Thatcher was well ahead of them. She recruited, provisioned and trained frontline cops in riot control. I was one of those cops and had no idea why I was being trained in riot control.

Successive governments have decimated police numbers in the desire to cost cut and, since 2008, for ‘austerity’. No one has considered there might be a good reason for people to take to the streets but the prospect is looming, possibly in a matter of weeks. Nor will they be restricted to London, many parts of the country voted to Brexit.

The police were overwhelmed during the Tottenham riots, properties burned and people injured over a week of civil unrest for a known drug dealer and gun runner who was shot and killed by the police.

We’ll wait and see how truly out of touch the British government is with the electorate, then we’ll see if the British public have guts.

Alternatively, Alan, if the UK crashes out without any agreement, which you apparently consider the ‘will of the people’, that is 52% of it, then, when the whole thing goes belly up and half a million people lose their job, then you may indeed see riots in the street. It won’t be pretty.

Britain and the Magna Carta countries (the British Empire/ Commonwealth and the USA sacrificed the best of our youth to save Europe during two World Wars. I have a great-uncle buried in France, killed in action in the last days of WW1, and an uncle who was the only surviving officer of his unit at the Dieppe raid during WW2, where he rescued the only ten surviving enlisted men – of the 110 who landed on the beach.

We owe Europe nothing, and I would never support another rescue mission, which appears increasingly likely. Europe is failing due to imbecilic leftist politics, and does not deserve to be rescued again.

I just returned from Thailand, where I met a French citizen. We spoke all evening at a party where everyone else spoke Thai and/or English. He said he was completely finished with Europe, and will move overseas as soon as he can. He spoke of the creeping takeover of France by radical Muslims and their violence against civilians and the authorities. I ventured that Europe was failing, and in mere decades would become little more than a museum due to its foolish leftist politics – he enthusiastically agreed.

On Brexit:

Britain will be vastly better-off out of the EU. The economic future of Britain should reside in a new Free Trade Agreement with the USA and the Commonwealth – as we leave Europe to fail under its imbecilic leftist/green energy policies.

and at 3.785 liters to a gallon, is $8.66 per gallon
I paid 3.15 per gallon in Sonoma County CA last week and will refill at $2.95 per gallon (or .779 per liter) tomorrow in Sacramento for my return this weekend

Ben – gas is expensive here in most parts of Nevada – pretty much the same price as Kalifornia. We are building roads and infrastructure to support all the Kalifornians moving here, and in return, they are bringing their liberal ideals to Nevada in hopes of turning it into East Kalifornia. We just elected a Democrat senator from San Francisco who lives here just enough of the year so she doesn’t have to pay Kalifornia taxes. She’ll do her best to make Nevada the same kind of cesspool she just left.
We really should be spending money on building a wall to keep out Kalifornians.

The NY times reported that the tax increase was equivalent to 25 cents a gallon. That small tax increase isn’t nearly enough to apply the economic pressure necessary to stop people from using fossil fuel powered cars. The pro-carbon-tax website “carbontax.org” suggests 14 cents to start, then increasing by 11 cents PER YEAR, every single year after that, until emissions start noticeably dropping.
There’s no way those pushing carbon taxes would actually be able to sell them politically, if they advertised the cost up front. The only reason support for action on carbon emissions appears high in public opinion polls is because the questions don’t include the cost. “Would you personally pay $1.25 in additional gas tax per gallon, if it helped solve climate change?” I think support for action will drop to 10% or less. Only those that don’t drive (or drive electric cars) might still support it, provided they are also economically ignorant of how the tax will raise the price of every other good and service…

Yes Rocky: The UK government is more subtle than Macron. Our green taxes are served up by stealth.
While our energy bills show the VAT tax , they do NOT show the GREEN TAX element, now becoming a major constituent of the bill and likely to increase steadily as intermittent power increases. Hence there is no sudden trigger point to galvanise mass objection on the streets with any increases being laid at the door of the energy suppliers.

I believe there is a similar situation in the States where the subsidies are paid from federal funds so do not appear on consumer bills; but not sure about that.

Anyhow it keeps the great unwashed quiescent and all it does is moan about austerity.

You are correct, many little green turds, er umm, easter eggs are hidden in utility bills and in add on taxes for various things. It is an effective way to bleed a victim till they are weak enough to control.

It seems to me, that this is not entirely, or even mainly, about the response to climate change. Rather, the Western European socialist experiment (government guarantee of old age retirement and healthcare costs) is on the verge of collapse. The driver seems to be demographic. There are simply not enough young people (due to birth control and abortion) to pay all the benefits that have been promised. There are perhaps 1 1/2 workers on the average, to support each old person and to supply the money needed for healthcare. This is unsupportable. The day of reckoning has been put off for the last ten years by making the real interest rate a couple percent negative. Now the accumulated capital of the middle classes has been drained and the interest rates are trending up. The only recourse is to try and raise the money by extortionate taxes on the productive middle class. I don’t see a way out and the crisis seems to be upon them.

The way out is dismantlement of the welfare granny state, but until there is massive deprogramming of the leftest way of thinking, that will never happen. I am afraid that the Judeo Christian culture is doomed.

The leftest view of the world is all wrong. They believe:
1)All cultures are equal in worth and values.
2) All religions should be respected.
3) There is an entity called free will in each human.
4) Equality of outcome should be aspired to
5) CO2 is a pollutant
6) Green energy is nirvana
7) A hard core criminal in most cases can be converted to change and repent if only through enough reeducation.
8) There are more than 2 genders
9) The main stream media is not biased towards leftest positions
10) The Chinese Communist party will eventually reform and stop its attempted domination of the world.
11) First past the post election systems are bad and everything should be proportional representation.
12) In past generations the non white world was noble and without violence nor discrimination (the noble savage hypothesis).

How do you square this with the demands of “Political Correctness”? The left does not abide by those who disagree. So just what is this “free will” that you postulate? The left is seriously delusional, as you note in many of your items, but I can’t understand why you include free will as an example of something that is “all wrong”.

Consider the following two people:
1-an otherwise sane person who thinks he doesn’t have free will, and
2-a person in a mental hospital who thinks he is controlled by a device implanted in his brain by some malignant agency.
Which of these two is better off?

Answer: the guy in the psychiatric institution. He thinks his problem can be fixed–that the device can be removed.

Robert S, …. I can’t answer for Alan, ….. but I agree with his inclusion of said and my reason(s) are:

“Free will” is nothing more than a nurtured belief of an imaginary mental attribute that the “leftists”, the Christian Religion, the Freudian “psychobabblers”, etc., have employed as a means of convincing the gullible and not-so-gullible public that they possess a “free will” to do what is “right” …….. and that what is “right” is whatever the aforesaid “leftists”, Christian Religion and/or Freudian “psychobabblers” tells them is the “right” thing to believe or do.

If a person is nurtured, by a supposedly caring “mentor”, to believe they actually have a “free will” to make “personal” decisions, then that same person can be more easily convinced to “do or say” whatever said mentor wants them to “do or say”.

The “conscious mind” does not possess a “free will” ability, …… only a “choice making” ability.

And choice making is only applicable iffen their “subconscious mind” presents the “conscious mind” with more two or more entities to choose from.

Absent free will, how can there be personal responsibility? I think you have put the cart before the horse. We have free will, therefore we are responsible for our actions. It can not be otherwise.

I agree that the idea of responsibility and duty are absent in the therapeutic indoctrination that passes for a K-18 education in most of the U. S. But this doesn’t excuse the victims of this pernicious system from their responsibilities. It will come to them as time passes, hopefully not in a gulag. Perhaps in a gentler form like Venezuela’s descent into a tropical tyranny and mass starvation. But reality will endure the latest delusion of the masses, and there will be price to be paid.

The left, the progressives who think peace is the norm and we can outlaw war, take it for granted that soldiers can be held accountable for following “illegal” orders. If anybody is denied free will, it will be the soldier they decide to make an example of. So they agree to this notion, but they apply the principle with careful discrimination.

Are you per chance admitting that you actually believe a person, any person, who claims that …. “The Devil made me do it” ….. and therefore you believe they ARE NOT personally responsible for their words or actions?

“ I think you have put the cart before the horse. ”

Not so, Robert S, ……. “You are what your environment nurtured you to be”. And therefore your “conscious” mind is subservient to your “subconscious” mind.

“ We have free will, therefore we are responsible for our actions. It can not be otherwise.”

Samuel C Cogar –
If you do not believe in free will, you believe that all your actions were completely determined before you were born in a completely deterministic world or
there is an outside being of some sort controlling your every thought and you are essentially just a remote-controlled robot.
Even people who literally have guns pointed at their heads have chosen death and sacrificed themselves for others.
I believe there is always a choice. It is up to you to make the best life you can.

If you do not believe in free will, you believe that all your actions were completely determined before you were born ”

SocietalNorm, ……. iffen you had stated that ….. “some actions are predetermined before you were born”, …… then you would have been 100% correct. 😊

And those “predetermined actions” are referred to as Inherited Survival Instincts and/or “hard-wired human instincts”. And they are “encoded” in the DNA that you inherited from your biological parents.

SocietalNorm, prior to their birth, be it vaginal or caesarian, a fetus (baby) has no “conscious” memory simply because it’s “sense organs” have not been subjected to any environmental stimuli. But post birth, the sense organs begin “uploading” info/data which is stored in the DNA of the brain’s neurons with similar/associated data containing neurons being conjoined via a synaptic connection.

And it takes weeks, months and years for the child to acquire their “conscious” memory, And one’s “conscious” memory is buried deep within the dark recesses of the skull/brain and it has no direct link to any of the sense organs. The “subconscious” memory controls all the “data” transferred to or from the “conscious” memory. Thus the reason one does not have the “free will” to make conscious decisions.

“Even people who literally have guns pointed at their heads have chosen death and sacrificed themselves for others. ”

“Yup”, and most mothers will put their own life in jeopardy if their child’s life is in danger. An inherited instinct characteristic of most females to guarantee survival of their offspring.

“The attempt to develop international cap and trade markets for anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, ultimately aiming to determine a global price for carbon, is the most extensive attempt ever made to use market-mimicking mechanisms to deal with an environmental externality.

Addressed to the problem of climate change, it is an exercise in the adjustment of the social welfare function on a global scale, and it envisages expenditures which will run into trillions of dollars. “

If the people I know online are anything to go by, it would seem that Christianity is growing fast; it’s just happening outside the church, because most churches have been infiltrated and perverted by the left, just like most of the other Western institutions.

Certainly I will be willing to believe in God if it turns out we are entering a new Little Ice Age right now, right as Global Warming Hysteria peaks.

Thats not exactly true Jim. If there isnt enough money coming from the middle classes (the situation now), then the first recourse is to cut budgets for services to the middle classes – again the situation now. This means that the middle classes pay again. When the books still dont balance then the next recourse is to frighten the middle classes and get them to pay down even more – whats happening in France big time and what is happening in the UK and the USA (+many others). There are not many recourses then left for government so the next recourse is the public taking action. Which I for one am convinced has resulted in Trump, Brexit and ‘Gilets Jaune’…… and not before time.

Once the status quo has been derailed it may take a while to get it back on the tracks again so I hope the political classes are taking note or they may be finding going out in public increasingly unpleasant

I don’t understand what you mean by direct taking. Would that be like confiscating retirement accounts? The French had a 2% tax on wealth that Macron removed. Is that the kind of thing that you mean? But, I am really concerned that there may not be a graceful way to resolve this kind of crisis. If you cut off old age government like social security or the French equivalent, what happens. Tens of millions are left without any means to obtain a livelihood since they haven’t saved enough and had enough kids to support them. I suppose that would mean revolution — your status quo derailed bigtime. On the other hand the government cannot extort enough money to pay for the benefits. Tough times. For reasons that I don’t completely understand the US is ten to fifteen years behind the French timeline.

You don’t understand what he means by “direct taking” because he never said anything about “direct taking”.

what he did say was:
1) if not enough money, first recourse is to cut budgets for services
2) the next recourse is to frighten the middle classes into paying more
3) not many recourses then left for government so the next recourse is the public taking action.

I think it’s that last bit that you misread/misunderstood. He’s not talking about government actions there, those were in points 1 and 2 (though I’d argue that 2 is usually governments first recourse, Governments prefers to expand, not cut, their size and expenditures), he’s talking the peoples response (ie the public) once government has gone too far. The people response comes in many forms, he listed a few:
1) Election of Trump (and Trump like politicians such as we saw recently in Brazil)
2) Brexit in the UK
and
3) the Gilets Jaune protests in France.

“
1) if not enough money, first recourse is to cut budgets for services
2) the next recourse is to frighten the middle classes into paying more
3) the next recourse is to start printing “truckloads” of $500 and $1,000 bills (paper currency)
4) not many recourses then left for government so the next recourse is the public taking action.”

Well, the US did avoid Obama’s Clean Power Plan, sorta. It is rather like one of those villains in a horror movie that keeps coming back to life in the sequel.
Look for Nancy Pelosi to try to resurrect that beastie, despite anything that happened in France.

6 Dec: Heartland Institute: PRESS RELEASE: Solidarity, Heartland Institute Sign Historic Climate Communique at COP24
By James Taylor, Jim Lakely
Polish labor union that stood up to the Soviet Bloc and changed the world joins Heartland on front lines of resistance to climate alarmism
KATOWICE, POLAND (December 6, 2018) – The Heartland Institute and representatives of Solidarity, the historic labor union founded by Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Walesa that helped bring down the Iron Curtain, signed a joint statement on Wednesday calling on the United Nations at COP24 to ensure the “restoration of the Scientific Method and the dismissal of ideological dogma at the United Nations.”

Iffen the Democrat lefties take control of the House, Senate and POTUS …. they would shur as shootin turn control of the UN building in NYC over to the DHS to be renovated into “rent free” apartments for illegal immigrants and family members …… with a Voter’s Registration and a Driver’s License issuing offices situate in the main entranceway of the building. 😊 😊

Oh yeah, and would make room in the main entranceway for an official Voting Precinct …… for whenever elections are held.

France contributes about 1% of global CO2 emissions, thanks mainly to generating electricity from nukes. How much are they supposed to sacrifice for the proverbial drop in the bucket?

Canada’s carbon policies border on suicidal — especially if you believe “all politics is local.” It’s a resource-based economy, much more than France. It’s also a much smaller population, and among the coldest of all major countries. If anything, Canada stands to benefit from global warming. There’s already evidence that farming is moving north in Canadian prairies.

What are they supposed to do — impoverish Canada’s 1/2 of 1% of global population in order to reduce their drop in the bucket to half a drop in the bucket?

The way China’s growing, they’ll be able to buy most of Canada’s significant assets pretty soon, maybe turn the whole place into a colony, with Australia thrown in. Does that benefit Mother Earth? Or anyone?

Even if all the top 620 emitters of ghg in Canada switch to a non carbon generating fuel, the climate in 100 years will only have a reduction in temperature of 1/1000 C. That will be Canada’s contribution after 4 years of a total of $5 billion in carbon taxes. Madness.

I should add that if they all switch the taxes dont get paid but the expenses go up because the non carbon fuel is more expensive. Thus when they pass on the extra expenses to the consumer, inflation goes up anyway. In that case without any taxes that will be paid the government wont have any money to send out the rebate cheques to the population. Thus inflation will go up for nothing and the people will be stuck with the extra prices.

To make it worse BC has just announced that they will force the oil and gas producers in their province to switch to electricity to produce their commodities. However the grid hasnt been built to handle the increased use of electricity in the nortern ares where the oil and gas is produced.

this a warning shot across the alarmists bow. They have conducted themselves as if thy have nothing to lose in their bid push to reduce us all to grass skirts and algae cakes. The have now reached the first barricade where real resistance occurs. The zealots will push on regardless. Cooler heads recognizing they have far more to risk will begin to moderate their rhetoric. Which will win? That will depend on how many cities go up in smoke.

There has been a long building anger as France’s economy (for working class people) has not improved and taxing the heck out of energy is going to make it collapse.

The flame is lit. It looks like there will be more protests this week. The protestors have sent a list of 40 demands to the French government.

Marcon has caved. His government has formally removed the future fuel tax.

Marcon is also talking about re-instating the wealth tax.

Marcon is also talking about bringing out armoured vehicles to protect French monuments for the Saturday protests.

As mayor of the northern port of Le Havre he said he had felt local anger rise every year, after every election. “It’s been muted for a long time, because it’s been silenced for a long time, by shame, sometimes by pride.”

Confirming that the fuel tax had been abandoned, he told senators that the calm of most protesters around the country contrasted with the “extreme violence” seen in Paris.

“Unlike others, I’m not seeking to apportion blame for this anger,” he said. As mayor of the northern port of Le Havre he said he had felt local anger rise every year, after every election. “It’s been muted for a long time, because it’s been silenced for a long time, by shame, sometimes by pride.”

According to French media, Mr Philippe (William: Marcon pulls the strings) will decide on Saturday whether to deploy armoured vehicles to clear roads in Paris if barricades are erected. Such a deployment has not taken place since 1968.

Macron rejects trade deals with countries outside Paris climate accord
The French president is calling on other countries to join him in refusing to sign new deals with ‘powers that do not respect’ the Paris Accord
Chris RiottaNew York @chrisriotta
Tuesday 25 September 2018 18:47

In Canada our national propaganda wing of the Liberal party called the CBC is 24/7 on about carbon pollution and the un reports on said “pollution”. It is so over the top that is obviously propaganda. The average person sees higher taxes for no reason but all of
the media says the world is burning and this is in a country that is frozen 2/3rds of the year.

We are already moving into a Maunder Minimum in sun spot activity which is highly indicative of a new Little Ice Age. The thermosphere is cooling per NASA, glaciers in Iceland have stopped shrinking and for the first time in 20 years they have started to grow and right now the amount of North Hemisphere land under snow is two standard deviation units above it’s 20 year average. Time to look to Florida for any good farmland for sale before the Cinese beat us to it.Global warming is a myth !

There is a lot more to the French protests than just climate policy, and they should not be viewed through that narrow prism. The last time a poll showed Macron wih 50 percent public support was in May, and that was an outlier — and we are talking dozens and dozens of polls over months. The last time a poll suggested a credible 50 percent support was in January.

It took less than a year for the majority of French people to realize they had fallen for a con and had elected a globalist, big-banking puppet.

Some of my French friends have said to me “We knew he was not a real politician, just a figurehead, but we truly believed that his advisers would be serious people who knew what they were doing. And then they were appointed…”

The recent protests have had an impact. But just imagine if the banlieus (Paris ‘suburb’) dwellers had used the opportunity joined in — it would have been a catastrophe. But the taxes did not affect them.

France is ahead of most as it is mostly zero CO2 nuclear plus hydro, where italready made the big cuts in CO2 emissions that are possible in generation. So cutting means messing with transport and heating, making them more expensive for no benefit of any kind for the people paying. This cost better hidden in electricity renewable subsidies, so dumb people don’t realise what the cost of pointless CO2 reduction is, and tha renewables can’t even deliver this, as they depend upon 100% fossil backup..

Other countries who are close to this position of zero CO2 generation are Paraguay and Sweden. But are their government and people stupid enough to agree to sign up to expensive transport and heating to subsidise what can’t work for no actual climate change reason, to prefer belief in the most extreme versions of an unreliable model prophesy, from an overpaid group of UN gravy train riders, that the IPCC itself says cannot be considered a reliable predictor of future climate.

France is ahead of most as it is mostly zero CO2 nuclear plus hydro, where italready made the big cuts in CO2 emissions that are possible in generation.

However, France is looking to cut back on their nuclear (from the currently 70-something% of their power down to 50% in the coming years). If CO2 reduction truly is the goal, then leaving the nuclear power alone and concentrating on the less than 30% of non-nuclear would make more sense.

UK has been pulling a rock solid 2GW out of the French interconnect for the last week and another 1GW out of the Dutch.
And what the Belgies, are 5 of their 7 nukes still offfline? Such a shame they didn’t learn from Ancient Romans on how to mix concrete.

Kudos to the French public, but I wonder if the public in other countries, including the US, have enough courage to resist the eco-loonification that’s going on. The looney-indoctrination has been taking place for a long time….

That’s why the left hates the Electoral college. It’s easy to convince large segments of the urban poor to believe that, it’s not as easy to convince as large a percentage of the rural middle class of that.

What has been the attitudes of the French people when it came to making the promises of reducing CO2 emissions? What was the general flavor of comments directed towards Trump for pulling the US out of the Paris accords? Is this not what the people of France asked for! Did they think it was free?

The next move will be for the UN to coordinate revisions to the accords whereby countries back off their expensive commitments in exchange for doing something a lot less expensive. That is, instead of spending $100 billion on windmills and raising taxes, they can simply pay $5 billion per year into a reparations fund.

That will be checkmate. Countries have backed themselves into a corner and the only way out will be to do the only thing that the UN actually cares about — wealth transfers.

There is a better than 50-50 chance this is not over in France. Macron caving on the carbon tax may not be an end but a beginning. New demands are being made now and the threat of violent protests coming this weekend is serious enough the government is discussing how to react if Paris burns again.

“According to French media, Mr Philippe will decide on Saturday whether to deploy armoured vehicles to clear roads in Paris if barricades are erected. Such a deployment has not taken place since 1968.”

The president and prime minister however are willing to rely on the armed forces and national security apparatus if necessary. The regime will bill any such move as restoring order and protecting monuments, businesses and lives.

Just checked the bebe and it appears the festivities carried on well into the night, with Macroon still in hiding. Most likely behind the skirts of his vieille mere. (I hate that my keyboard won’t let me properly spell things in other languages!)

That’s why my great-granddad and his colleagues in the OR Senate voted for the Oregon system, which includes ballot initiatives. The political class might resist with every possible legal means keeping a measure repealing carbon taxes off the ballot, but unless the OR Supreme Court knowingly violates the law, opponents will eventually run out of shenanigans.

In france, we pay thousands of Euros on the price of each new car diesel or petrol. Upto €10000.

Macron claimed he was like General de Gualle when in fact he is the complete opposite. We want him and his cronies out.

The suspension of taxes, probably to July, is not good enough. One of his party was asked by a gilet jaune how much the minimum wage was SMIC. She didn’t know and just started screeching at them. They walked out of the studio.

French diesel price by the end of Nov. had gone up 23% in the year 2018. What irritated many in the country & it’s territories was that at that same point in time a barrel of oil had gone up 14%.

The ongoing protests threatening have roots in other issues than indefensable fuel price trend, which the “yellow vest” delegated commentators raised the last week in Nov. The core demands, as I understand them, are : lower the retirement age, rescind employer tax credits, raise the minimum wage, institute a maximum monthly income limit (€14-15,000) & enforce a rent control. A bit later jumping in with other demands are those insisting on sustainable transportation, no work out-sourcing, solve homelessness, make social security universal, government ministers paid only mininal salary, close nothing (nurseries, post offices, train stations, etc.), & even anti-GMO/glyphosate.

Hate to nit-pick but the vests seem to be somewhere between yellow and green, which after a bit of research, might more correctly be called chartreuse.
(Don’t even ask me to research what color mauve is).

But France could be a taste of what’s to come if more governments try to tax carbon dioxide emissions. – Article

Could we just start by taxing all the politicians for emitting CO2 every time they give a speech, on TV or otherwise?

That might cut CO2 emissions drastically in the blink of an eye. The proposal stars, of course, witht anyone who gives a speech at these climate conferences has to pay for the privilege according to the volume of CO2 s/he’ll produce during the speech, as well as the CO2 volume produced by anyone at all who listens to the speech. I think this could produce a sizable cash volume that could be applied to useful things, such as updating housing insulation and improving access to clean water. Just thinking out loud – er, electronically.

The ‘protesters’ as expressed in the Paris streets were not so much protesters as anarchistic rioters, vandals and criminals. I see no reason to honor them regardless of their asserted claims and gains or economic suffering.

People’s expensive, hard-worked for and won private property was randomly destroyed by bands of vile criminal thugs, and public property was destroyed wherever possible as well.

In 1989 a Polish shipbuilding yard went on strike for over18 months and managed to collapse the political will and authority of the Polish government, and collapse Eastern European support and imposed order of Soviet Union, which then bought down the Berlin Wall and dissolution of the Soviet’s ‘Evil Empire’, and all the communist governments. It wasn’t the only factor but it was a major trigger.

They simply withdrew their labor from a corrupt rotting system.

What these French ‘protesters’ did were vile criminal tactics and a total disgrace to civilization, and I do not want to be associated with their brand of politics or thuggery, no matter what their dismal excuses or policy gains since.

They are in the wrong, just as much as Macron is a deluded fruitcake, and France, and Europe as a whole, is very much the loser from here.

John
I’m french and the situation is not what some of you describe, the violent protesters seem to belong to minority groups of “ultra left” and “ultra right” who disguised themselves in “Gilets Jaunes” to commit destructions.
As I said in other comment, the real “Gilets Jaunes” are in the largest majority peaceful, but the media do not show them because it is not marketable …
Claude

Since you cannot build a wind turbine without a heavy investment in steel and concrete, then these necessarily have a large CO2 footprint (even if it may occur elsewhere). So why not tax the windmills instead?

In fact almost everything created by our industrialized nations is built upon fossil fuel use, so he could tax anything he wants, which he should like, as that was probably the main point of the whole exercise.

Hello,
I am French and I am aware of living a period uncontrollable and critical for the moment but important for the next events.
Macron, our president, was elected by default and deluded for a few months.
I said that I did not vote for him and that I deposited a blank ballot in the ballot box.
70 to 80% of the population currently reject it by supporting the “Gilets Jaunes”, but only for questions of insufficient minimum income and for his arrogant and contemptuous speeches that he addresses to the poor French.
The exponential growth of taxes to reduce the CO2 footprint “the gas of life” ridiculous with regard to France (1%) triggered this revolt. (net minimum wage in france = 1173 € = 1333 $)
Nevertheless, the spirits of the French remain predominantly impregnated by the belief in anthropogenic global warming supported by politics and the media.
The realistic climato: https://www.climato-realistes.fr/, of which I am a part, are very few to dispute the assertions of the IPCC.
We organize conferences, create websites, distribute books, etc. … with the help of French, European, Canadian and American scientists to inform our compatriots about certain realities that go against the theories of the IPCC.
I am very sensitive to your comments that I find quite informed and relevant in their majority.
We often visit the website of Anthony Watts whom we thank for his work.
Sincerely,Claude
Excuse me for the Google translation …

I wonder if the regime will reveal the backgrounds of the “demonstrators” arrested for violence. Earlier this year there were protests and arrests associated with clearing out migrant camps in and around Paris. Migrants and their supporters might have availed themselves of the opportunities presented by massive protests by French citizens to wreak revenge.

As Claude has noted, the worst outrages appear to have been perpetrated by politcally strange street-fellows of the Far Right and Left.

Thank you Rip,
I forgot to mention in my commentary, given the current political uncertainties of France, that I wished, of course, that everything be resolved calmly. It is not won with regard to the day of tomorrow.
As always, the media only retransmits sensational and deceptive images, while the “Gilets Jaunes” are, for the most part peaceful, it is important to specify …
Claude

You have Trump on your side – see his Tweet to his “friend” Macron to return those taxes to the people.
Les Gilets Jaunes look like recovering their government of the people, by the people, for the people, not of the banks, for the banks, by the banks, all 4 of them.

As a great candidate said, Paris talks of the end of the world, the provinces of the end of the month.

bonbon
Exact, the end of the month against the end of the world …
His majesty Macron has been thinking for more than a week to know what he will be able to announce tomorrow. This exercise will be very complicated because it is now unbelievable.

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